Computing centers that employ one or more printers to serve a group of users, such as a networked group or other work group, typically rely on the printers to batch process print jobs (e.g., print-out a series of different print jobs in succession). Such printers produce separator pages which are used for identification and segregation of print jobs in an office, departmental or other shared or multi-user printing environment. Separator pages generated at the beginning of a print job are commonly referred to as headers, while pages generated after a print job are referred to as trailers. Such separator pages include one or two lines of text that identify the requesting party and identify the job number.
Generation of separator pages at a printer is commonly established as a default setting. Thus, a default application setting of adding separator pages applies to both secure and non-secure print jobs. However, because a user is often required to physically go to the printer panel and input a security number (PIN) in order to print secured document(s) there is no need for identification of the print job via a separator page. Accordingly, printing separator pages in such instances results in wasted paper. Wasted paper attributed to the generation of unnecessary separator pages may lead to thousands of dollars wasted every year by businesses using printers. There are additional instances in which separator pages are not needed, but are generated nonetheless.
Accordingly, a mechanism to disable the generation of separator pages is desired.